


voluptas carnis et curiositas

by Miss_M



Category: Pilgrimage (2017)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Catharsis, Catholic Guilt, Caveat lector: the Mute’s past is dark as hades, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Erotic Blasphemy, First Time, Hopeful Ending, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Memories, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Past Abuse, Past Rape/Non-con, Past Violence, Period Typical Attitudes, Pining, Religion, Road Trips, Sexual Content, Sins, Slow Burn, mention of harm to animals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-16 19:01:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,400
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29212347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “These three kinds of vices, that is, carnal pleasure (voluptas carnis), pride (superbia), and curiosity (curiositas), comprehend all sins.” - St. Augustine
Relationships: Brother Diarmuid/The Mute
Comments: 13
Kudos: 25
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	voluptas carnis et curiositas

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LearnedFoot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LearnedFoot/gifts).



> This is an extra treat. I own nothing.

The sun was behind him, and the sand underfoot was compact from the tides, making for decent footing, but the fine, dry sand from the dunes blew into his eyes on the breeze. He turned his left shoulder to the dunes, shielding his face, and twisted his tunic around his lower arm for a shield. 

Ranged before him were half a dozen foot soldiers, two mounted knights, and an archer. He alone could not keep them all from reaching the boat, but if he could send De Merville to his just reward, the others might flee. 

The breeze shifted, flinging salt spray on his lips, and brought him a snatch of sound: a boy’s voice, shouting. 

He pivoted on his heel so he could see his opponents as well as the boat, just a quick jerk of his head in either direction, and saw Diarmuid running through the shallows, the waterlogged hem of his habit turning dark as tar. Brother Geraldus abandoned the boat also and pursued Diarmuid, but he lost his footing and splashed face-first into the lapping waves. Diarmuid pulled the relic from the bag at his waist, held it against his chest as he ran. He’d run thus the day he’d found John, delirious from the sun and the salt water, shipwrecked on the beach below the monastery: a pale face peering over the rim of the coracle, hair like a bird’s nest, and skinny legs pumping under his habit when he’d run to get help. A little bird in a black robe too big for him.

Diarmuid was still yelling, snatches of Latin and Gaelic together, but the breeze had shifted again, and John could not make out all the words. A prayer, or something close to one.

“… May the Shield of God defend us!” Diarmuid shouted out the last words, folded his body around the rock, then leapt up and flung it high into the air with a cry of effort.

All his fighting instincts screaming at him not to do it, John lifted his head to follow the rock’s arc, squinting against the light. Like a black bird, it flew, absorbing the sunlight spilling between the rent clouds. 

The devil in his black soul guiding him, Raymond de Merville didn’t pause to watch the rock fly through the air. He caught John just under the ribs with his short mace. Bastard must have wanted to enjoy this, or he might have made short work of it with his sword. 

The pain lanced him, but it was a soft pain, a blood and flesh pain. John fell to his knee and slashed out with his sword, making De Merville jerk back before he advanced again, swinging the mace and yelling in bloodlust. Sand gritted between John’s teeth as he dropped and rolled out of the way of the next blow, letting the sword slip out of his hand before the naked blade could cut him. Flinging up his arms to protect his head, he caught another glimpse of the rock, which still seemed to be rising into the air. It caught the light and, rather than swallow it, reflected it back like a mirror. 

A chime like a silver bell sounded across the flat sand and the water. _I am a loud gong or a clashing cymbal._ The bit of scripture crossed John’s unruly mind as his eyes squeezed shut against the glare from the rock, and the salty air above and around him was sucked up as by a great fire, extinguishing De Merville’s battle cry. John had heard such a silent roar under the walls of Constantinople, when the Greeks had made the isthmus burn and Frankish knights roast in their armor aboard their ships. As though conjured up by the memory, his head filled with the smell of burnt flesh and the quiet that sometimes follows after violence, the world holding its breath in the presence of such sinful rage. 

His knee bumping John’s shoulder when he knelt at his side, Diarmuid panted: “Are you all right?” 

John lowered his arms and took in the sight of the sky above him and Diarmuid’s red cheeks, his eyes boring into John. The smell of burnt flesh rolled over them like a wave, but the boy seemed not to notice.

“What have you done?” Geraldus had reached them as well, his wet, dirty, white habit clinging to him, and his gaze fixed on Diarmuid with an intensity that made John roll to his side and pick himself up, ignoring the raging ache in his side. 

As he stood and turned to face the angry Cistercian and Brother Cathal approaching behind him, John saw also the source of the stench: De Merville and his men were charred husks lying scattered across the sand like driftwood thrown up by a storm. Their armor was twisted, their clothes and hair singed and gone, and their faces indistinguishable lumps of burnt flesh. They lay unmoving, and the rock rested on the sand among them.

Geraldus seized Diarmuid by his hair. “What did you do? What were those words you were chanting?”

Diarmuid tried to twist away, but Geraldus held him fast. 

“Brother Geraldus, he saved us,” Cathal interceded, but Cathal would not step closer to danger of his own volition. It wasn’t in his nature, but it was in John’s.

He tried to grab the back of the Cirstercian’s neck, but his hand slipped and he wound up with a handful of the soiled white cowl. John twisted the cloth around his hand, choking Geraldus till his grip on Diarmuid eased and Diarmuid could escape, and when the French monk flailed around, trying to land a blow, John used his grip to bend Geraldus forward even as he jabbed up with his free hand and punched Geraldus in the stomach. Geraldus fell to his knees in the sand, gasping and clutching himself. 

John released him and cast his eyes over the others: Diarmuid returned his gaze, rubbing his scalp gingerly; Cathal stared at Geraldus, and the surviving ferryman was far away, pulling his empty boat back out of the surf. 

“You devil child,” Geraldus heaved the words out on choppy breaths. “What was that you recited?”

“Just the Blessed Patrick’s prayer,” Diarmuid replied. “And… and a poem.”

Geraldus’ face twisted with anger as he looked between Diarmuid and John. “You mixed a prayer with pagan magic to save a common lay brother, a sinner. What were the words you spoke?”

“Atchíu forderg, atchíu rúad,” Cathal recited softly, his eyes on the black rock resting on the sand. He looked at Diarmuid then, and John could see that Cathal was still afraid. “‘I see it bloody, I see it red’,” Cathal translated into Latin for Geraldus’ sake. 

Geraldus spat on the sand like a peasant and heaved himself up to his feet. “You’ve accepted the devil inside you, boy. I’ll hand you over to be broken on the wheel once we are in France. You should not be within fifty leagues of the relic.”

John moved smoothly, inserting himself between Geraldus and Diarmuid, absorbing the loathing which Geraldus’ eyes seared into him. Diarmuid’s hand on his arm seared him more as he held the boy back from flinging himself at the Cistercian in his passion.

“I couldn’t let him have to kill any more!” Diarmuid cried. A tear, or perhaps a drop of his sweat, landed on John’s shoulder. “I couldn’t let him die for us! It wasn’t right.” 

John could feel Diarmuid’s eyes on the side of his face, Diarmuid’s breath on his cheek. “It wasn’t right,” Diarmuid repeated in a whisper. 

Geraldus puffed himself up for a retort, but he didn’t get to speak.

“Brother Diarmuid performed a miracle,” Cathal said, his voice still shaking with fear but his eyes steady on the Cistercian. “Think of what the Holy See would say if you brought them the relic of St. Matthias and told them it was used for black magic, while you stood by and did nothing.”

Geraldus backed away from the three of them, like a man suddenly realizing he was outnumbered in a tavern brawl. 

“You Gaels have been flirting with heresy for too long. I’ll go on to Waterford alone,” he declared. “Best hope another papal legate doesn’t visit you, if Baron de Merville’s men let you pass through their lands unmolested first. After you killed the baron’s only son and heir,” he finished ominously, and John knew just what the tale would be which Geraldus would spin in Rome, a tale in which Geraldus had fought his way alone across an island of demons and heretics to bring his precious cargo to the Holy Father, like a cur begging his master for a reward.

Cathal waved to the ferryman, who’d succeeded in pulling the boat up on the sand yet kept his distance, watching the morality play unfolding on the beach with his hands on his hips and a grim expression on his weathered face.

“Diarmuid, give me the jewels,” Cathal said. 

Diarmuid obeyed, and Cathal went off to negotiate with the ferryman. John hoped for all their sakes that Cathal had cunning and sense enough to impress upon the man the wisdom of never telling a soul what he’d witnessed on that beach. Best for everyone, even Geraldus, if Geraldus got to live by his lies and the men from Kilmannán were believed dead on the road.

While Cathal negotiated safe passage for him, Geraldus strode over to where the relic rested on the sand and laid hands on it. He cried out and jumped back, staring at the red blisters blooming on his palms like poppies. He spun around and pointed his finger at Diarmuid. 

“You pick it up! Put it in the bag and give it to me.”

Diarmuid looked from the Cistercian to the relic. The hesitation and desire to touch the rock again were plain to read in him before he set his jaw and said: “No, I won’t.”

Geraldus raged at him then, but he couldn’t say anything he hadn’t said already to make Diarmuid obey him, and he had failed in that more than once already.

Soon enough, they left. Cathal had even got a hank of bread from the ferryman as well as advice on how best to return to the monastery. 

“He said that if we follow the coast westwards, we’ll cross over into De Cogan lands within a day,” Cathal explained as he and Diarmuid and John picked their way up the dunes. “The De Cogans and the De Mervilles hate each other, and further west, the Mac Cárrthaig endure and are at war with both. It won’t be safe, but it’s better than retreading our steps through De Merville lands.”

“Are you certain you want to come with us?” Diarmuid asked him kindly, not like an accusation. “You could still go on to Rome with Brother Geraldus, he doesn’t hate you so much.”

Cathal glanced back from the top of a dune. John followed his gaze: the Cistercian was hunched over the black rock, trying to work out how to pick it up while his heart remained as impure as it was, and the ferryman was hurrying him along. It was late in the day, and the tide was coming in. The waves had already pulled in one of the charred corpses and set it floating out to sea – the archer, who’d lacked armor. Before long, the waves would cover the spot where Geraldus and the rock were.

“There’s nothing to go to,” Cathal said softly. “The monastery will need all of us in the days to come.”

They made camp in a small hollow between hillocks overgrown with coarse grass, in a spot where the dunes lapped up against scrubland, all of it as brittle and dry as though untouched by the perpetual rain. They did not risk a fire as they ate the ferryman’s good black bread and drank stale water from their waterskins. Then Cathal and Diarmuid recited the psalms for Vespers, and John closed his eyes and prayed alongside them while the night closed tightly over them. John had pillaged the remains of De Merville’s men for a dagger, its blade only slightly misshapen by the heat, and he’d kept the sword. Cathal’s eyes were as wide and round as a hare’s when they caught the moonlight reflected off the two blades, but Diarmuid took one look at John settling in for a vigil and told him to get some sleep, Diarmuid’s earnest gaze slipping to the evil, throbbing pain in John’s side, covered now by his tunic. 

He would have demurred, but he knew the stubborn set of Diarmuid’s jaw, and the blow that cunt De Merville had dealt him did trouble him greatly. He slept, and in his dream he was visited by a vision of himself borne aloft by an unseen force, angelic or diabolical, who could tell. Beneath him, the world was all darkness and raging flames, as all his many sins visited him and overpowered him. He found himself again in the place he had never truly left, for a man carried his sins with him everywhere. With his sword, he smashed a jewel-encrusted altar at the great church built by Constantinople’s namesake, he dragged the whore seated on the patriarch’s throne down to fuck her before tossing her to one of his lieutenants, he encountered a family of rich Greeks who tried to flatter and beseech him and only fed his bloodlust that way, he tore out of a convent while women’s wailing echoed behind him. He hadn’t even cared for plunder so much as he’d wanted his sword to be red all the time, he’d wanted to smash beautiful things to pieces and smash any woman or man he encountered onto himself and leave them broken and bleeding in his wake. The city was shrouded in smoke, its walls holding in the screams like a golden chalice. A beautiful city, he had found it, and it hadn’t meant anything when his blood was up, as it always was up back then. When he was young, his father too had gone on crusade and left his bones at the walls of Acre, and his Norman mother had used to tell John he had his great-grandfather’s berserker blood. In his dream, the crusader bishops all sounded like Brother Geraldus; they had said the Greeks were the enemies of God, and so killing them was just and righteous and would be absolved. The contradiction hadn’t bothered him at the time. 

Whispering voices woke him, his hand going straight to his sword hilt before he recognized the speakers: Diardmuid, failing to keep it down, and Cathal, cornered and afeard. 

“… You have to! Please,” Diarmuid pleaded.

“I am not a priest. I can’t absolve anyone of anything. You know this, Diarmuid.”

“But he shouldn’t have to live with this! All the killing that Brother Geraldus made him do…”

John lay motionless, while the night and the sudden silence enwrapped him like a shroud.

“ _He_ shouldn’t have to live with this,” Cathal said in his soft voice which could cut a man without Cathal even noticing. “And what of you, Diarmuid? Did Abba ever tell you how your mother left you with the brothers when you were a baby? She said the Normans had burned her out of her home, killed her husband. We suspected maybe there was no husband, maybe that was part of her sorrow. Now I wonder if the question isn’t _who_ fathered you, but _what_.”

“Cathal…” 

Hearing Diarmuid’s tone, John could have torn out Cathal’s throat in that moment. 

“You said it was a miracle,” Diarmuid protested.

“Yes, but I don’t know who performed it, whether God or the devil.” 

After that, there was nothing left to say. The two monks settled down on the dry grass alongside John’s motionless form. He could hear Diarmuid swallowing his tears, Cathal’s unhappy breathing. _Sin is like a pestilence_ , the priest who’d served as John’s tutor and confessor in his youth had liked to say. _It spreads._

John woke to dawn mist covering the hollow like a lid and a black shape sitting hunched beside him: Cathal.

He sat up and looked around wildly, the wound in his side screaming at him, and grabbed his sword. 

“He’s gone foraging,” Cathal told him, shrinking away from the naked blade and the look in John’s eye. “He promised not to go far and to come back at once if he saw anyone.”

A rustle, the crack of a twig, and Diarmuid hove into view out of the mist, the hem of his habit spangled with dew. His arms were full of bright green shoots. 

“I found watercress to break our fast,” he announced happily, as though he’d been blessed to forget all recent events. “There’s a stream, clear as the Blessed Virgin’s tears. And comfrey for your wound.”

Not forget the past – set it aside for the time being. There was more than one kind of courage, John had found in his years with the monks. 

Cathal said a quiet prayer when John lifted his tunic so they could examine his side, where De Merville had struck him. The flesh was puffed-up and black, and he flinched at Diarmuid’s prodding fingers, but the skin was not broken and he felt no ache of soft insides pierced by broken ribs. Lacking a pestle or bandages or anything to mix up a poultice with, Diarmuid tore up the stalks of comfrey, rolled them between his palms and gnashed them with his fingers, then spread the green, fragrant mush over John’s side and wrapped it around with a strip torn from the end of John’s tunic. They said Lauds, though it was likely closer to Prime judging by the sun – sleep had overpowered them all after the last few days – then broke their fast on fresh watercress, leaves and little white flowers both, and the dry crusts of the ferryman’s bread. 

Just after Nones, they encountered a boy about Diarmuid’s age tending sheep in one of the first real meadows they’d encountered once they risked moving a bit inland, away from the shore, in case any pursuers clung to the shoreline as well. The boy looked nervous at the sight of John with his sword, but the presence of two monks reassured him. He led the way to a farm: a large clochán with a rowan branch affixed above the entrance for good luck, and a wooden lean-to next to it, both standing beside and dwarfed by a thick, circular stone wall open to the sky and jagged like an old man’s teeth. The foundation of a giant’s house next to a mouse’s dwelling. The color and shape of the clochán’s stones made clear the homestead was built from material torn out of the much bigger, older enclosure.

“A cashel,” Cathal said with something like awe, distracted from his unhappy frown caused by that pagan rowan. “These lands must have once belonged to a great family, before the Normans. Perhaps even before the Norsemen.”

The boy they’d met drove the sheep into the cashel and barred the entryway with a cart he lugged into place with Diarmuid’s help. Vanitas vanitatum. All great works would be brought low again.

The head of the family was a woman with grey streaking her nut-brown hair. She welcomed them curtly, asked few questions about who they were and where their journey was taking them, thawed a bit when she showed the monks her youngest son, who lay ailing in his bed, and Cathal offered to pray for him. But her frown only deepened when she took in the sight of John, with his sword and his dagger and what he imagined was a look about him like a wolf or a wild man of the woods had approached her hearth, clad all in grey fur. Geraldus had told him he reeked of blood. He could feel the violence thrumming still down his limbs, pounding like a blacksmith’s hammer in his heart. He had kept it tamped down for a long time, but now it was awake and would not be lulled so easily again. 

“You’ll sleep outside,” she said, motioning him out. She looked like she might have liked to spit. “I’ll not have your kind under my roof. Fénnid.”

A warrior without a tuath, no better than a brigand. Diarmuid tried to plead John’s case, but the woman crossed her arms over her chest and stood her ground. John nodded to her, one warrior to another, and went out to the lean-to where they kept the butter churn and the empty ale barrels.

The darkness in the lean-to was filled with the sough of the wind and the occasional bleat of a sheep startled awake by the moon. John lay on the packed-earth floor, his weapons by his side, and dreamed about his youth before the crusade. 

He hadn’t gone blood-mad in Constantinople; he’d been born thus. He’d bloodied every single childhood companion he’d had, and laughed. His confessor had liked to have John down on his knees during confession, so the man’s soft white hand with the gold ring cutting into his fat finger would be before John’s eyes, cupping the front of the man’s ecclesiastical robes while he had John recount everything he’d done since the last confession. Sometimes John used to think he was so filled with sin so as not to disappoint his confessor’s expectations or his mother’s fond remembrance of her family’s berserker line. 

“He who has sinned in the thoughts of his heart, is guilty. And if he has frequently entertained evil thoughts yet hesitated to act on them, whether he has mastered them or been mastered by them, he is guilty. And he who has carried out the sinful intent to its completion, is guiltiest of all,” the fat fuck would recite. He had a book, a penitential, which listed sins and the required penances like prices in a Jew’s shop: those who kiss licentiously without pollution shall be corrected with fasting and do penance for forty days, those who commit the sin of Onan together shall do penance for up to a year, while those who befoul their lips – for four years, seven if they are accustomed to the habit. Those who defile themselves with a male shall do penance for three years, and those who do this in femoribus for one year, and sodomites for seven years, the first three of those on bread and water. For boys who did thus, the penalties were lesser, though not by much. By the time he had reached his twentieth summer and was no longer a boy, John had done it all, and worse, with sufficient frequency that he could not have expiated it all if he were to live as long as Methuselah. His confessor had known this and kept asking for more and more details during John’s confessions. 

And yet, knowing all this, still he had looked surprised when John had gouged out his eyes with the silver knife the priest had been using to peel an apple and only put down so he could rub at himself while listening to the tale of John’s latest visit to a house of ill repute, or the servant he’d bent over and buggered behind the kitchen, or whatever it had been. To be sinful was bad enough; to be blind to one’s own sin was surely worse. 

John had said as much to his mother after the deed, but she’d made him swear he’d take the cross at the first opportunity anyway. 

When Dandolo, that wizened, blind, Venetian cunt had placed Baldwin of Flanders’ arse on the emperor’s throne, instead of Montferrat who’d actually taken the city, during the coronation John had spat on the floor of the pillaged cathedral for all to see. Blood had seeped down the cracks in the marble, and his spittle turned pink where it landed. He’d found passage to Marseilles the very next day. But even back home, the crusade and he had stayed soldered together. He’d remained what the Gaels called geilt: a wild man, a mad man. He remembered only snatches of that time: the archbishop cursing him from the altar although he was the son of the most powerful of the city’s families, a fellow nobleman’s house engulfed in flames, a man in a torn yellow shirt scratching at John’s face, John’s cock and his dagger both red to the hilt. It was his mother who’d sent him away for good, had him drugged, locked in a box banded with iron for the journey to the coast, and placed in a boat without oars. 

John woke before dawn, achingly hard in his breeches. The abbot at Kilmannán – the first man of God John had ever met who’d made him believe the world may not be a place of only sin – had let him read the monastery’s copy of the writings of John Cassian, copied onto parchment the brothers had made themselves, as payment for supplying other monasteries. Cassian had written that one could not prevent oneself from sinning in one’s sleep, but one could diminish the likelihood of such a sin by rooting out sinful thoughts before they flowered and filled up one’s spirit and one’s heart, and then spilled out when the waking mind could no longer wrestle them into submission. John had never been adept at keeping sinful thoughts at bay, not even since he’d lived at the monastery, and the other way of sating a sin – taking himself in hand, pulling the nearest warm body to him – would have been an even greater sin. 

He heaved himself upright, cursed silently as the pain in his side reminded him of its presence, then, trying to liken the pain of his flesh to the spiritual pain his sin inflicted, he went out into the heather-colored dawn. 

Pulling off his tunic, he found a level bit of ground by the cashel on which to perform his daily crosfigel and recite the long psalm which was his regular act of penance. And in the course of reciting the well-worn words, his cock softened, leaving him feeling scoured clean like a beach after high tide, even though his balls ached dully now. 

He rose and turned to find Diarmuid sitting on a hassock of tufty grass a little way away, watching him. 

“We’ll need to change that.” Diarmuid gestured at the strip of cloth around John’s midriff, crusted with dried vegetable mush.

John peeled it away to reveal the ugly bruise underneath, but Diarmuid was no longer watching him with an herbalist’s eye.

“I never asked you about your cross,” the boy said, his eyes on John’s chest, like he could see through his flesh to the other side and the black cross inked on his back. A lot of doors had remained closed between them, of necessity, since that day when Diarmuid had found him and saved him, but now they were friends of the road and so perhaps Diarmuid felt brave about rattling a lock or two. “Was it so you’d be protected where you couldn’t see, in case someone snuck up on you from behind?”

John nodded. That was the reasoning he’d supplied if any of his crusader brethren had asked, though in truth it had been just another one of his rages: the desire for pain and blood and a permanent marking, turned against himself for once, rather than another.

Diarmuid shifted, like he was sitting on an ants’ nest. “We took turns, praying over her son all night. I had time to think. I am afraid of what I did on that beach. I think… I think I should perform a peregrinatio.”

Peregrinatio pro Christo, the white martyrdom. One of Éire’s gifts to Christendom, the abandonment of all one knew in order to seek the place of one’s resurrection elsewhere in this sinful world.

John watched Diarmuid struggle with his thoughts, with shaping them on his tongue. “Would you come with me? It’s not how it’s done, peregrinatio should be performed by oneself, but would you?” Diarmuid asked at last, practically spat out the words. John was the one who’d befouled himself with the blood he’d spilled, yet Diarmuid was the one who’d thought to perform this penance. Diarmuid’s pleading eyes like stone wells, points of reflected light deep in the darkness. 

John came up close to where the boy sat, bent down in half till they were at eye level, and nodded again. And was rewarded by the dawn breaking on Diarmuid’s face, his smile, his hand coming up to stroke John’s beard. The lad had always been free with touching him, right from the beginning, when he’d clung to John like a limpet, following him as he went about his work and chattering at him in a tongue John did not yet understand, no matter how often the older monks warned Diarmuid to leave the Mute alone. Only, Diarmuid was not a child any more, and of late John struggled with the old urge Diarmuid’s innocent affection woke in him. He had tried to choke off that part of himself, which if he was honest was most of him, and was confronted with his failure again and again.

Abruptly he stood and moved away from Diarmuid, pretending not to see the boy’s confusion. He would think he was the one who’d done something wrong, when the sin was all John’s, as it always was and had been.

Despite her grim look, their host loaded them down with the gifts her household could provide, the generosity due to a visitor and to holy men: bread and cheese, a sack of oats for porridge, a few wizened onions and carrots from the last of the family’s winter stores, a small sealed earthenware jar of hazelnut oil, and even a pheasant from one of the secret traps which would have cost them, at the very least, their hands, if the De Cogans had caught them poaching their lord’s birds. The woman accepted Cathal’s blessing on her and her kin and her sheep, and watched them walk away down the rutted track past her clochán, John going first, Diarmuid in the middle, Cathal bringing up the rear and casting nervous glances all around them. 

“Poaching is theft and therefore a sin,” Cathal argued when they stopped to eat after Vespers. “Theodore of Tarsus says that men should not eat birds or any animal that are strangled in nets.”

“She made us a gift of it,” Diarmuid argued back. “And why should it matter how the bird was caught?”

“Because of the Book of Acts! Ut abstineatis vos ab immolatis simulacrorum et sanguine suffocato et fornicatione a quibus custodientes vos bene agetis valete. You know this, Diarmuid.”

 _Avoid food sacrificed to false idols, and blood, and anything that was strangled, and fornication._ The Apostles might have been thinking of John when they wrote this.

He caught himself nearly smiling at the thought and admonished himself most harshly: for five summers, he had toiled to put himself beyond further reproach and expiate at least a small portion of his sins. He had even decided not to speak, lest his tongue fed his bad thoughts and led him to more bad deeds. Now he was amusing himself with blasphemy and salivating at the thought of roast pheasant. He hadn’t had game since he’d returned from Constantinople, before his mother had exiled him to what should have been his death. 

Thinking of the long road which lay ahead of Diarmuid and himself, and the fear which would eat away at Cathal once he learned he would have to finish the return journey on his own, John snatched up the object of the disputation and began to pluck its feathers. Diarmuid and Cathal stared at him. He kept his head down and kept plucking. 

In the end, Cathal refused to have any and prayed out loud while John and Diarmuid split the bird between them, satisfying himself with some bread and herbs and a tiny sliver of cheese. They were none of them beyond the reach of temptation. 

In the morning, Cathal flew into predictable terror when they reached the shallow river beyond which Norman power ceased, at least for the nonce, and Mac Cárrthaig lands began, and Diarmuid told him that there they would part ways. 

“You need permission from the abbot before you leave the monastery,” Cathal insisted in a reedy voice which winged up like a frightened bird over the rushing water and the hills spilling upward to become the jagged mountains to the west. “You can’t just do whatever you want. You can’t leave me on my own now. What will I do if I’m set upon?”

Diarmuid laid his hands on Cathal’s shoulders and said with a gravity beyond his years: “Cathal, you have made it this far. Don’t let fear into your heart now. The Mac Cárrthaig won’t harm a man of the cloth from a friendly monastery, and you’ll be safe from the Normans once you cross the river.”

Cathal changed tack. “What about you? How will you two manage? What would I tell Abba if something happens to you?” His eyes shone with tears. 

“God will protect us,” Diarmuid said. “And we’re not leaving forever. Tell Abba that we’ll return when the time comes. Tell him I’m sorry about the relic, and that is why we’re not coming back at once. Tell him the brothers should go to the abandoned monastery in the Skelligs for the season, just in case the De Mervilles or someone from Rome comes looking for us.”

Cathal remained disconsolate, but his will was no match for Diarmuid’s. The Blessed Benedict had written that a monk should hate his own will, renounce it, and take up obedience as an all-conquering weapon, but in the contest which John witnessed in that wild spot between the water and the mountains, there was no question of who had the authority, if not the seniority. 

After Diarmuid had embraced him and given him the kiss of peace for goodbye and good luck, Cathal glanced at John, motioned at Diarmuid: “You keep him safe. Not a hair shall move on his head, yes?”

John nodded, holding Cathal’s fierce yet timid gaze, and Cathal had to be content with this. 

They stood on their side of the river and watched until Cathal’s black-clad form had vanished over the foothills which climbed toward the cloud-beshrouded peaks that separated the fertile plains from the ocean. Then they turned their faces to the north and began to follow the river toward its source and beyond. Diarmuid’s intention was to hug the stony shore till they reached the unconquered Gaelic lands in the north of Éire, and from there continue maybe to Alba, to the holy islands where the Blessed Columba had lived, or farther still, to sail the desert in the pathless sea. 

Diarmuid led, guided by who knew what impulse, from God or the devil or the sídhe, and John was content to follow. He still went tense as a drawn longbow at every hare breaking through the undergrowth, every dry branch cracking under its own weight, and he took the time every morning to hone the blades of both sword and dagger till they were keen enough to slice an angel’s wing in half. But even without the measured discipline of the monastery, their days followed a certain rhythm. Day by day, the rage inside him subsided as does the ocean after a storm, and his mind was no more unsettled by his thoughts and memories than it ever was. 

And Diarmuid… Diarmuid acted still like half a boy, darting to every hazel bush to check if by some miracle the green nuts hadn’t ripened early, chattering to John about whatever blew into his head on the salty, western breeze. But just as often, he was as sober as an abbot, judging which path would be best for them to take so they risked running into as few people as possible, or showing what John had taught him about tracking sheep by their droppings and cows by their dung, and finding water in the wilderness, and watching out for the deep crescent moons left by a tall horse bearing a knight on a muddy road. 

Novices in monasteries following the old ways were trained and guided, not by a master of novices, but by an older monk. The Gaels called this anamchara, soul-friendship. John was the farthest from a monk a man could get, yet from the start, Diarmuid had moved between he and the late Brother Ciarán, like a foal drinking from two wells. Ciarán had been the best of men; John had precious little good to offer, but whatever it was, he made sure Diarmuid learned by watching him, as he had learned to understand Gaelic, almost without noticing the day when Diarmuid’s tumbling brook of incomprehensible words became familiar, words which shaped the world anew and made John feel like a man perhaps not unworthy of salvation. 

Days slipped past, like water over pebbles. Spring came on, greening the meadows and woods and even the seaside cliffs they passed. John had never considered that a peregrinatio could be a thing of joy: the twitter of birds overhead and the taste of their eggs fried on a stone heated in the fire, the slowly warming days and nights, the rain like a blessing rather than a curse. Perhaps the joy came in surrendering oneself to the world and the pathless track through it, instead of struggling to bow everything to one’s will. Perhaps this was what the Blessed Benedict had meant. The terrible bruise in John’s side faded from the color of blood pudding, to the color of heather, to a pale yellow that blended with his sun-darkened skin, till Diarmuid pronounced himself satisfied and John in no more need of poultices, yet kept looking for the herbs Brother Ciarán had taught him, collecting these in the bag where he had used to carry the relic. 

They slept side by sight every night, whether in a fold between the hills, or the lee of jagged rocks keeping out the wind, or under a spreading oak, its bark growing over some forgotten tuath’s carved sigil. On those occasions when John woke before Lauds with Diarmuid lying so close the boy’s warm breath bathed his cheek and John’s cock stood up as stiff as a bishop’s crosier, he would roll the other way, go wash in a stream or the ice-cold ocean, and perform his crosfigel as though he were the only man on the face of the earth.

One early dawn, late enough in the springtime that the first wild strawberries appeared in the grass like tiny jewels, John woke to find Diarmuid gone. 

They’d spent the night deeper inland than they usually risked, on the fringes of Norman lands, in a small, abandoned clochán, several stones tumbled from its dome to show patches of blue or star-pricked dark between the overhanging branches. They’d tapped a wandering cow – one of the big, russet ones the Normans had brought over the water – the day before, and its blood was drying in the shade, for blood pudding, so they would linger in that spot another day or two. There was nowhere for Diarmuid to have gone.

Tearing out of the clochán as though it were on fire, John cast about the clearing surrounding the hut and spotted Diarmuid at once, over between two yews, kneeling with his arms outstretched at his sides, his back to the clochán’s low, narrow entrance. 

The lad was in his loincloth and didn’t raise his head when John approached, and John found himself having to wait for Diarmuid to speak, which was rarely ever the case. 

The lad finished his silent recitation, struck his narrow, pale breast three times with his fist, murmuring about his guilt, his guilt, his very great guilt. His arms dropped, trembling with the exertion, but still he didn’t raise his head or speak. Birds, flowing water, a hedgehog in the grass: the world murmured around them, but they were silent. 

“I dreamed,” Diarmuid broke the silence. “I dreamed about the beach, and the rock, and…”

He hunched over himself, like a snail curling inside its shell, and gripped his knees with his hands. Finally, he looked up, and his face was bathed with tears. 

“I didn’t mean to kill them. But I couldn’t let them… You shouldn’t have had to…”

His chin trembling, he closed his eyes and swallowed loudly. His whole frame shook with the storm he wouldn’t let out. It hadn’t so much as occurred to John that Diarmuid might recall his sins in his dreams too, for what bad dreams could he have had?

John knelt before Diarmuid and cupped the back of Diarmuid’s neck in his hand. This was dangerous, and his palm felt the skin, the long hair, the knobby bone like a responsibility. If you severed a man’s neck, you ended his life. 

John squeezed the back of Diarmuid’s neck gently and shook him, just enough to make him open his eyes, not to hurt him. Diarmuid blinked his sorrow clear from his eyes and let John pull him closer, brow to brow, nose to nose, breath soughing out of one mouth and into the other. Diarmuid’s arms twined around John’s neck easily, like it was nothing, and John allowed it, though it made his heart quake in terror at what he, John, might do. Diarmuid had brought him back to himself thus that day in the accursed Hollows, and now John reeled Diarmuid back from his despair in the same manner. 

The day passed. They prayed. They foraged. They checked on the drying cow’s blood. They caught a wild hare, skinned it with John’s dagger, basted it in herbs and some of the precious hazelnut oil, and roasted it over a fire; it turned out tough and gristly despite their efforts. 

The sun wheeled above, dragging its cloak of stars after it. Once, when John had been a lad about Diarmuid’s age, the queen who’d loved his city well had shown herself to the people, riding like a man astride a pearl-white mare. She’d drawn up beside John where he stood in the street, and leaned down in her saddle, pinched his recently broken nose between her knuckles, and smacked his bristly cheek. She was old, skin creased by her smile, but her grey eyes were those of a hungry wolf when she’d addressed John: “I’d take you with me, little sweetmeat, but it would displease your mother.” As she’d swept back upright and urged her mare on, her long blue cloak had brushed John’s face and breast, making him shudder even more than the touch of the queen’s hand had done.

Half dreamed, half remembered, that moment held John in its silken fist when he woke, deep in the night, till he recognized the brush of Diarmuid’s elbow passing by his flank, too soft to be a nudge yet more substantial than a piece of cloth. It was warm in the clochán, and they slept in their loincloths. Diarmuid’s labored breathing and the sensed rather than seen impression of movement in the stone hut’s close dark alarmed John at first. If the lad was sick, what could John do for him? 

He raised himself on his elbow and felt Diarmuid’s face, following the sound of his heavy breathing. Heated and moist, his skin, and his mouth closing in startlement, nearly catching John’s fingers between his teeth. John passed his hand over Diarmuid’s throat, his sweaty chest, to where he was, yes, naked and hard in his own fist. John had guessed he might be. 

John wrapped his hand, bigger and stronger, around Diarmuid’s, without stopping to examine his thoughts or his heart. The words were engraved on John’s memory, he’d heard them often enough during his youthful confessions, though they’d never altered his behavior one whit: _No sin is so deep that a man may not expiate it, if he cease from evil and with all true repentance by the instruction of teachers repent of his offenses._ John had failed in every conceivable way to either expiate or cease from his corruption. At least he could take Diarmuid’s sin away from him, take it on himself, one more on the mountain which were John’s sins. 

“John,” Diarmuid said, at the crossroads of a sigh, a cry, and a pleading. “ _John._ ”

The sound of his name transfixed him, nails and a spear in his side, sinner that he was. He held still, even his hand around Diarmuid’s was still, till Diarmuid’s other hand found his face and touched him with such gentleness as John still couldn’t believe could be real. 

“I eavesdropped,” the lad babbled, short of breath from his exertion. “When you were sent to us, and Abba asked you your name, and you wrote it in the dirt. He said _Jehan_ ,” Diarmuid butchered the unfamiliar French syllable. “So I always knew, but I never said, because it was your secret. Are you angry with me?”

John was unsure which part Diarmuid expected him to rage over: that Diarmuid had found out his name, or that Diarmuid had kept it locked up in his heart, because in his innocence he’d chosen John, of all men, for his friend. 

John searched the hidden recesses of his heart, as John Cassian urged all men to do, and found in himself still the same anger, the same wildness as always, but it pointed everywhere except at the lad by his side. He’d have gladly set the world on fire to keep Diarmuid safe. There was no anger there. 

Diarmuid started to speak again, but John covered his mouth with his own, the lad’s breath startling at the meeting, the scratch of John’s beard, his tongue parting Diarmuid’s lips wider for a taste. Then again, for a taste only served to inflame him. Diarmuid’s fingers snagged in his beard and held him locked in the kiss. He squeezed his hand around Diarmuid’s and tugged, and Diarmuid shuddered from the crown of his head to the ends of his toes. 

John tugged on him harder, and the lad whimpered. He was young. It would only take a moment. But sin was sin whether it lasted a moment or an eternity. 

John broke away from Diarmuid’s lips, the pain when several hairs from his beard remained between Diarmuid’s fingers piercing him and urging him on, and dragged himself down Diarmuid’s body. John pushed Diarmuid’s hand away and took the lad’s cock into his mouth. He wanted to linger, but it was impossible. He descended till he was choking and Diarmuid’s private hair tickled his lips and his nose. He swallowed around the straining flesh in his throat; he swallowed Diarmuid’s shout which echoed under the clochán and rent the still night. Diarmuid startled nearly upright, his hands gripping John’s hair with desperation.

His scalp burning as Diarmuid twisted his hair convulsively between his fingers, John put his back and neck into the task, saliva dripping from his mouth and his tongue curling as best it could in his haste. The memory of all the times before, before he was the Mute and Diarmuid’s friend, clashed and reverberated in his head like armies in the field, so he thought he’d truly run mad. But the only sound in his ears was Diarmuid’s panting, Diarmuid whispering his name, Diarmuid choking back something, an oath or a prayer, who knew, when his skinny hips rose, and the telltale throb traveled up Diarmuid’s shaft between John’s lips, and his bitter treasure flooded John’s mouth. _Qui semen in os miserit – this is the worst of evils._ Perhaps even worse than sodomy. Seven years’ penance for either. John drank down to the last drop, and swallowed, and swallowed again till Diarmuid shouted at the constriction around his softening cock, and John wished that he could stay in this moment forever. A hell it might have been, but what was hell to the damned who knew nothing else, who delighted in their suffering?

John pulled off, licking his lips and swiping his hand over his beard, then licking his palm. This was who he was. He had always been bad and wild. He would take it all, so Diarmuid wouldn’t have to carry it. His cock stood up from his lap, having filled and risen while he’d pleasured Diarmuid.

Movement in the darkness: Diarmuid sitting up, reaching for him. Kind hands on his face, his chest, lingering on some of his scars, one from a Greek dagger, another from a Frankish whip. Fingers trembling at the locked doors flung open, tracing the unspoken yet evident history of John’s savage life. John closed his eyes, though he could not see Diarmuid, pulled away his loincloth, and wrapped his hand around his own cock. 

“John,” the lad whispered, so close to his face, John drew a sharp breath. Diarmuid’s arms around him, now describing the lacing of scars on his shoulders. “John, show me how.”

Diarmuid’s hand joined his. John let himself lie back, spread his thighs to better feel the hitch and rise of his hips, reveled in Diarmuid’s breath hitching when John moved their hands together and then grabbed Diarmuid’s wrist and shifted the lad’s hand above his own, so that John could grip and stroke his shaft, while Diarmuid rolled the warm cup of his fist over the cockhead, guided by John’s free hand covering his. Diarmuid was lying half on top of John, his leg crossed with John’s, panting on John’s chest at the sensations, the stickiness being pumped steadily between his fingers with every upward stroke of John’s fist, Diarmuid’s thumb of its own volition tracing the wet head, the slit, the skin moving over it. 

John’s head rolled on the clochán’s hard floor. His heart was beating in his throat as he and Diarmuid worked him together. He was used to violence, it was what he knew and what he deserved; this tenderness, wanton as it was, flayed him utterly. 

Diarmuid hitched himself even closer to John, so that John could feel Diarmuid’s renewed vigor pressing against his side, the lad having hardened again quickly at their shared efforts. Grunting in his throat so that Diarmuid would not fear this for refusal or disgust, he slid his hand up his slick cock and over the head, squeezing himself mercilessly, and pushed Diarmuid’s hand off him, at the same time as he wrapped his other arm around Diarmuid’s waist and pulled him close. 

Diarmuid exclaimed his wordless amazement as he planted his hands on John’s hard chest and rubbed himself backward and forward on John’s thigh, the slick, sensitive skin of his cock rubbing furiously on the coarse hairs festooning John’s leg. John held him close with his arm around Diarmuid’s narrow waist, and squeezed Diarmuid’s skinny arse for good measure, and fisted his own cock almost painfully, torn between Diarmuid’s pleasure and his own. With a wordless roar, which took him for a moment back to that day on the beach at low tide, faced with too many enemies against whom to defend those who truly mattered, he emptied himself all over his stomach, and was followed a moment later by Diarmuid’s second release, Diarmuid’s short nails digging into his chest, Diarmuid’s warm seed pooling in the shallow bowl of John’s middle and mixing with his thick private hair. 

Diarmuid’s arms collapsed under him. He lay on John’s scarred chest, panting like sun and wind both on the sweaty skin, and did not startle when John enfolded him in his arms and threaded his fingers through Diarmuid’s hair, sweat-clotted at the nape. 

This was not what John had intended when he’d thought to take Diarmuid’s sin on himself, and the guilt of having led the lad astray tore at him with sharp claws and teeth. But the pain was familiar and Diarmuid’s warm, sated presence was not, and so John let himself hold on to the newness of it, till sleep crept over him and spared him any foul dreams he so richly deserved. 

They slept through Lauds and Prime, and when John cut his eyes open against the brightness of the day, sunbeams like fingers reaching into the clochán through its narrow doorway and casting the interior into stark light and deep shadow, the first thing John beheld was a wonder of God’s good creation: Diarmuid’s face before him, watching him, the weight of Diarmuid’s body still on top of him and stuck to him by their mingled, dried seed. Diarmuid’s fingertip traced a line from the top of John’s brow, down his hump of a nose, over his lips and bearded chin, and lingered in the hollow at the base of his throat, that spot where a man would fold like a cloak if you dug your thumb in hard enough. 

Diarmuid smiled. John wanted to reciprocate, but he wasn’t sure his face would remember how and he didn’t want to scare the lad, so he stole another kiss instead. He clutched Diarmuid to him and swept his tongue inside Diarmuid’s soft, eager mouth, thinking that any moment now he’d hear a bell, a trumpet, a seal cracking open to render his judgment. 

But Diarmuid clutched his face, played with his hair, their lips and tongues and teeth and breaths mingling, and he even rubbed his face in John’s beard, panting eagerly. His flesh was eager too, bright with vigor of a morning, John could feel it dragging on his stomach. 

They broke apart, and Diarmuid’s face turned both white like whey and red like fresh blood. 

“I’m sorry.” Diarmuid closed his eyes and gulped to catch his breath. To catch ahold of himself, when still he lay in John’s arms, between John’s legs. Diarmuid quoted from the Gospel of John, and John quaked in his heart at the coincidence. But the lad recited the verse in Gaelic, the blasphemy of it quaking John even more, but in a way which unmortified his flesh and made him start to swell and rise in response to Diarmuid’s body so close to his, to Diarmuid’s voice and the words he spoke: 

“For every one that does sin is the servant of sin, and the servant cannot make his home in the house of forever.” 

The Gaelic changed the meaning a bit at the end, from one dwelling in God’s house forever to the house itself belonging to life everlasting, regardless of who might be there or choose another dwelling place. 

Diarmuid watched John closely and said: “I am sorry I led you to this. But in my mind… I would take your sin into me, if you would give me it.” He brushed John’s lips with his, like he didn’t dare press for more. He sounded terrified: “I would take everything.”

In his mind, Diarmuid had sinned already, for curiosity was the vanguard behind which an army of all other sins followed. Sin entered through the eyes, but it was the heart which twisted the gift of sight to evil intent and wounded itself in the process. By looking, a man made himself heart-sore with desire and opened himself to the devil. 

In response to this revelation, in John’s mind, the rusted hinges of doors kept firmly shut swung open, and all the evil he had ever been capable of poured forth. _I would take even more_ , he thought, watching Diarmuid watch him, grabbing the back of Diarmuid’s neck to feel and see him stretch and preen into the touch. _I would chisel you till you begged me to cease. I would seat you on my cock as upon a throne and fill you to the brim. I would pour my lust without quench into the cup of your mouth. We would both starve on our agèd knees before we expiated all the ways I would have us defile ourselves with each other._

He knew that he was beyond redemption and that the sweetest fruit hid the bitterest worm, to make a man feel that he was on the narrow path when really he had strayed far from every chance of righteousness and grace. But when he jerked his chin at the clochán’s door and the sunny day outside, for he wanted to see everything of the sin they were intent on committing, Diarmuid grinned widely in response and kissed his brow like a blessing. Then John accepted that he would never know what that narrow path felt like beneath his own feet, as well as that nothing, nothing at all under the sphere of God’s heaven, would ever convince him that Diarmuid was anything less than the righteous man for whom the path was certain and every choice he made was guided by the hand of goodness. This was how men fell into deception and heresy, but if that were so, then Diarmuid was ensnared right alongside him, and that, John could not and would not believe.

They emerged from the clochán into a day like the fourth day of Creation: the first sunrise and the world newly stitched together. Fresh water from the stream to wash off the night’s residues, then John knelt before Diarmuid and looked up at the lad. Pale, smooth skin, long bones in his limbs and sharp bones bracketing his middle, stretching the skin over his ribs, sweeping away from his throat to his shoulders. And Diarmuid’s face, Diarmuid’s hand landing light as a butterfly on John’s cheek. He kissed that hand, the palm and the back of it, then leaned in and tongued at Diarmuid’s nipples, which were hard as acorns and sufficed to draw a cry from the lad which set the fire burning again inside John.

He pulled Diarmuid down with him into the spring grass, but Diarmuid rose to embrace him and tumble him on his back – grunting with the effort as though John hadn’t let him – and laugh into his mouth while they kissed, their cocks dragging together. Diarmuid reared up, his head thrown back, the long, pale, slender column of his neck flushing pink as the inside of a seashell, and his voice raised as if in praise, as he gave himself up to this pleasure. John imagined that Diarmuid’s hole must have been quivering already in joyous anticipation, and snaked his hand around to rub between Diarmuid’s arse cheeks and confirm that it was indeed so. 

The little jar of hazelnut oil they’d carried with them most of the length of Éire was to them now like manna, sent by providence itself. John rolled Diarmuid onto his front, pulled the lad up and back to his hands and knees, and pressed the hard muscle of his hairy thigh between Diarmuid’s arse cheeks. Diarmuid rubbed himself on the corded pressure, already gasping, while John poured glistening oil into his palm, its smell of sweet nuts, of summer and embers and all that was good in the world, wafting up to fill his head like an enchantment. 

He let it flow over and between his fingers, and licked his wrist when the sweet oil dripped down the back of his hand. Then he pulled his thigh away and pressed his fingers to Diarmuid’s hole without hesitation or mercy. Diarmuid tensed up and trembled, and John stroked his flank and nuzzled his nape while he pressed his fingers inside, feeling Diarmuid’s most secret shame accept him. He was burning at the tight grip of Diarmuid’s body around his fingers. Diarmuid’s high, repeated cries were not of pain, and he pushed back when John pushed forward, accepting everything that was offered. 

Cassian had written that the battle against the demon of fornication was a monstrous war in which few ever attained a complete victory, for the struggle was unceasing and required one to cultivate the discipline of both body and mind. Having taken his hand away to slick himself up with the fragrant oil, while Diarmuid waited with head hanging low between his arms and shoulder blades like a bird’s wings fluttering with his shallow breaths, John thought, _Hell with it_ , and gripped his shaft in his oily hand, and pressed the head of his aching cock to Diarmuid’s hole. 

Diarmuid dredged up a breath from the bottom of the ocean, so deep it sounded, and his back arched so his shoulder blades drew together, till with his whole body trembling from the exertion, he accepted this. 

Despite his trembling limbs, his hands like claws ripping up tussocks of grass, Diarmuid panted himself to stillness, then moved his hips, and took more. Swallowing the groan that wanted out, John wrapped his hands around Diarmuid’s thighs and pulled them even farther apart. Momentarily thrown forward and off balance, onto his hands alone, Diarmuid accepted this too and planted his knees firmly, and then John watched his hard, veined length push in deeper and stretch Diarmuid’s reddening hole, till he was gripped tight inside Diarmuid, and his thighs smacked and rubbed against Diarmuid’s, and his thick, black, private hair tickled Diarmuid where he was already stretched and raw-red. 

“John,” Diarmuid panted. “John.”

John moved, holding his breath at Diarmuid’s body disgorging him, the sight of it, the scent of the skin-heated oil, till with a slick, sucking noise he stabbed his hips forward and filled Diarmuid again. 

Their wordless groans filled the clearing, and the forest held itself still around them, the world not daring to trespass. 

Seizing the lad’s shoulder with his swordhand, so he could pull Diarmuid back into his thrusts and press into him even deeper, John fell at once into a savage rhythm. His heavy balls swung and bounced with his movement, and he could see thick white dripping on the grass under Diarmuid, as the lad let himself be used like this, and more than that, flung himself backward into the motion of John’s hips, arching his back and ululating John’s name to heaven. 

This was not enough, for though John had never cared for jewels, greed was nevertheless one of his sins. He wrapped his arm diagonally across Diarmuid’s chest, so he could grip the lad’s shoulder in his hand still but also pull Diarmuid back against himself. Diarmuid’s thighs were spread wide across John’s and trembled with the strain, and John was sheathed so deep inside Diarmuid that for a moment he had to cease his movement and breathe like a ram, his face pressed to the hair on the back of Diarmuid’s head, Diarmuid’s heart thundering under his arm. 

John bent them both forward and held Diarmuid close as they continued to rut, Diarmuid’s narrow back pressed to John’s broad chest, and Diarmuid crying out again at the deeper claiming. John gripped Diarmuid’s locks in his free hand and kissed the side of Diarmuid’s flushed throat, the pulse beating under the brush of his teeth, and caught sight of tears glistening on Diarmuid’s cheek. He stretched his neck forward as far as he could, and Diarmuid caught his intention and turned his head to meet John in a bruising kiss, teeth dragging on lips, Diarmuid sobbing his still unsatisfied need into John’s mouth. 

John unthreaded his fingers from Diarmuid’s hair and wrapped his hand around Diarmuid’s cock, Diarmuid’s own slick helping his intent. Diarmuid’s release followed almost at once, Diarmuid breaking their kiss to remind the trees and the sky once more of John’s name, while John bit the edge of his jaw and fisted his cock and felt the claiming thrust of his hips expel Diarmuid’s pleasure from him in spurts. 

He had never before in his sinful life felt the anticipation of his pleasure like this, for he had never before anticipated a pleasure like this. Now that it gripped him and whipped him on, he could not bear to part his body from Diarmuid’s in order to see better, let more of their coupling enter through his eyes and into his soul. Holding Diarmuid as close as before, John pulled back only so far as to feel air between his thighs and Diarmuid’s before he thrust, again and again, wanting more and wanting to finish, the length of him gripped without cease in Diarmuid’s still-twitching body. 

Diarmuid’s hands fluttered to every part of John he could reach – his thigh, his arm wrapped around Diarmuid, reaching back to grip the back of John’s neck. At last, it was the press of Diarmuid’s fingers covering his hand, which still squeezed Diarmuid’s shoulder to keep him close, which sent John tumbling. His balls tightened, and he felt the pulse of his release. Diarmuid’s wrung-out cry greeted him as he emptied himself of what felt like his entire miserable lifetime’s worth of desire. Burying his face in the side of Diarmuid’s neck, the lad’s hair brushing over his eyes, John uttered short, sharp grunts as he slammed Diarmuid down onto his lap and filled him with his seed, roll after roll of his hips taking and giving till they were both so spent they couldn’t stay upright on their knees. John swayed and pulled them both down, on their sides in the grass, John’s cock still sheathed inside Diarmuid, still pulsing dry and almost painful.

Diarmuid breathed like a man felled in battle in the circle of John’s arms. John closed his eyes, inhaled the scents of Diarmuid’s skin, his hair, hazelnut, and sun-warmed, crushed grass. His cock was softening but he wasn’t ready to be parted yet, and kept Diarmuid close as the lad’s breathing leveled off. The day kept its steady crawl toward night, and still John refused to open his eyes and give back into the passage of time, which also brought man to sin.

Diarmuid squeezed his thigh. “John?”

“Jehan,” John corrected Diarmuid’s atrocious pronunciation. 

His own voice startled him, like he’d lost his footing and fallen backward into the river of time with a jester’s loud splash. Diarmuid lay still in his arms, like he too couldn’t believe he’d just heard John’s voice, speaking like a man rather than grunting or baying like a beast on the hunt. Rough like gravel and sticky as tar in his throat, it made John wonder if he’d always sounded so harsh, like a stone had spoken, and had just never noticed before.

“Je-han,” Diarmuid tried, tonguing the letters into a shape closer to the one John heard in his head when he begged for God’s mercy and doubted he was heard. 

“Hm.” John nuzzled Diarmuid’s neck. “Poitiers.” 

The syllables almost defeated him. His throat hurt with the effort, and his eyes were wet.

Diarmuid half twisted around in John’s arms so he could see John’s face, his eyes fluttering for a moment when John’s cock and, John imaged, seed and perhaps a little blood slipped out of him.

“John of Poitiers?” Diarmuid asked, and John nodded, though Diarmuid’s pronunciation of the city of his birth made him want to laugh out loud. They were so close that John’s nose brushed Diarmuid’s cheekbone when he nodded.

Diarmuid cupped John’s cheek in his hand and brought their faces even closer, so they were brow to brow and could breathe in the air leaving each other’s bodies. Then Diarmuid’s thumb brushed John’s forehead, pushing aside his wild hair, pressing gently the shape of a cross into his skin. 

“John of Poitiers, ego te absolvo a peccatis tuis,” Diarmuid murmured with no trace of jest or cruelty, looking John in the eye, and kissed John on the mouth.

John’s whole life in all its iniquity and wretchedness washed over him briefly, but his arms tightened around Diarmuid as he drank deeply of the grace being bestowed upon him in Diarmuid’s kiss. A kiss of lust and peace, both folded together. They embraced in the grass, naked and unashamed under the dome of heaven. Scripture mentioned none of this having been permitted or even possible in the Garden of Eden, and for that reason at least, John was grateful that he got to live in this world of sin.

**Author's Note:**

> I am not an expert on the 1200s, and I included details from different points in Irish medieval history just because they looked cool and interesting. For research I used and liberally quoted, paraphrased, and poached-without-attribution (in the grand tradition of classical and medieval texts which knew neither the quotation mark nor the need for full and accurate citation) from:
> 
> Primary sources  
> John Cassian, _The Institutes_  
>  Nicetas Choniates’, Robert de Clari’s, and Geoffrey de Villehardouin’s accounts of the Sack of Constantinople  
>  _Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A translation of the principal_ libri penitentiales _and selections from related documents_ by John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer  
>  _The Rule of St. Benedict_  
>  _Táin Bó Cúailnge_ a.k.a. _The Cattle Raid of Cooley_
> 
> Secondary sources  
> Ian Bradley, _Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams_  
>  John T. Koch and Antone Minard, ed., _The Celts: History, Life, and Culture_  
>  Geoffrey Moorhouse, _Sun Dancing: A Medieval Vision_  
>  … and [gestures grandly] The Internet!
> 
> The title quote is from St. Augustine’s _Expositions on the Psalms_.
> 
> And yes, that is Eleanor of Aquitaine who flirtily unsettles young John while passing through Poitiers as a merry-ish widow. :-)


End file.
